If you want to get to get a job writing code and you don’t have a computer science degree, what do you do? “Attend a Boot Camp!” seems to be the common refrain. Specifically, one to make web apps. Web app boot camps, baby, that will learn you some code.

I’m going to pick on web app boot camps for a bit. The vast majority of opportunities to use code do not involve web apps.

Here are a few quick notes that I took during the Silverlight Atlanta Firstarter. I didn’t even attempt to take comprehensive notes, but I did jot down a few things that I found interesting. These are more for my reference than anything else. You won’t find a lot of content for each talk, but you’ll find a few things that I found important and worth jotting down.

At the very least, I put links to everyone’s blog or home page if I could find it. That way you can easily look up the person if you’re interested.

Overall Impressions

Overall, the event was great. I’m very thankful to all of the volunteers and sponsors who helped put it together. I’m really excited about continuing my “getting started” efforts in Silverlight and am looking forward to future meetups and events.

Though they introduced a very large amount of information, it was generally presented very well and served as an excellent broad introduction to Silverlight.

Introductions

Corey Schuman emceed the event and introduced the speakers. Great job!

Glenn Gordon was present as the “Developer Evangelist” from Microsoft. He brings free Microsoft events, resources, and information to developers in the Southeast. Cool.

Silverlight Soup to Nuts: Shawn Wildermuth

I really wanted to pronounce his last name “Vildermuth.” Shawn Wildermuth did the talk on “Silverlight Soup to Nuts.” (For the record, his rotating profile picture on his blog is freaky as hell).

Silverlight-tour.com – A national tour for agilitrain giving workshops and classes about all the new stuff in Silverlight 3.

With XAML, you can name only the elements you want to appear in IntelliSense. This reduces the clutter (such as label3,label20421,etc.) of having everything named.

Rock Scroll – Visual Studio Plugin – this is a cool plugin that Shawn had installed on his computer that puts a top-down look at all your code directly into the vertical scroll bar. Plugin is written (or published) by Scott Hanselman of Microsoft.

Ctrl K + Ctrl D – used to format code in Visual Studio (if you needed a hint that I’m brand new to developing apps in VS, here it is)

SLExtensions – Because no one should have to write their own converters. Silverlight Contrib and Silverlight Extensions recently merged.

this.OnPropertyChanged(“Name”); – can’t remember why I wrote this down

Anatomy of a Silverlight App: Tim Heuer

Tim’s back.

Silverlight Tools

Minimum

Silverlight Developer Runtime

SDK

Recommended

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (you can even use the free Visual Web Developer)

Somebody asked how you can get MS software other than retail – When applicable: Microsoft Action Pack, StudentSpark? (A program that gives students free access to developer software), BizSpark (a program that gives start-up free developer software)